About a minute of security camera footage released by police captures the intense life-and-death struggle between an employee of a North Campus area smoke shop and an armed robber. During the brawl, the clerk, 25-year-old Patrick William Reilly, was shot with the assailant’s handgun.

The video, shot by four cameras in and around Gotta Habit Gifts, 700 N. LBJ Drive, No. 113, shows the suspect entering the store with his gun raised. Reilly emerges from behind a counter and, with his hands raised, appears at first to begin dropping to the floor in submission. Instead, Reilly lunges at his assailant without warning, crashing through a display of merchandise before pinning the robber momentarily against a wall.

For about 24 seconds, the two men grapple for control of the weapon. The assailant temporarily breaks Reilly’s grip and escapes out the entrance, pulling the victim partially through the door as he fled. Wounded at this point by the single bullet to the chest, Reilly squirms in pain while lying face down on the ground, halfway in the shop and halfway on the sidewalk next door. After watching part of the fight from a safe stance, a frightened woman who appears to be a second shop clerk approaches her co-workers body and offers aid.

In the video, the suspect is wearing a black t-shirt and a blue beanie, pulled down low over his ears. Authorities had initially said that he was wearing a green hoodie.

The suspect’s shirt, among evidence collected at the scene by San Marcos police investigators, reads “DIRTY GHETTO KIDS. DISCARD AFTER USE. KEEP YOUR HEAD UP AND EAR TO THE STREET. NO HATERS.”

The Gotta Habit store, located in the San Marcos Center retail center at N. LBJ Drive and Sessom Drive, was robbed at gunpoint “twice in the recent past,” city spokesperson Trey Hatt said, but no one reported the intrusions to the police. Detectives are looking at those earlier robberies now, too, as part of a larger investigation, Hatt said.

Reilly was taken by San Marcos/Hays County EMS to University Medical Center Brackenridge in Austin where he was being treated in the intensive care unit on Monday morning. But the victim “was no longer in the hospital’s system Tuesday night,” the Austin American-Statesman reported today, citing a hospital spokesperson.

According to multiple sources the store had been robbed at gunpoint twice before but those crimes were not reported to the police. Why would you not report an armed robbery to the police? Is it your legal and moral obligation to report such a crime? What is Gotta Habit hiding that they didn’t want the cops sniffing around? Something is rotten in Denmark.

The very concept of head shops has always baffled me….if weed is illegal, how can there be entire stores focused on selling weed paraphernalia? Yeah I know they claim it’s for “tobacco use only” but seriously that’s weak – who’s ever seen someone bong a cigarette or some Red Man?